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Why Use IT News and Events’ Managed, Enterprise IT Newsletter Service?

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

Most people selling or marketing into the enterprise IT space see the value in having a regular newsletter with valuable content sent to their key contacts. However they know how hard it is to produce a quality newsletter that their contacts will value.

It’s a build or buy choice and I can make that an easy ‘buy’ choice!

I can provide an individual with a turnkey, managed Enterprise IT Newsletter service for about $33/week. For a team of five, I provide additional features, a custom website, and up to 1000 contacts per rep for about $22/week per team member.

Here’s the web version:
https://itnews.it-news-and-events.info

Those approximately 22 articles were the most clicked-on articles from the previous week’s newsletter that was sent to 50k+ subscribers of “IT News and Events“, which has been in production since 2011.

How to get started? Make a spreadsheet with up to 500 of your professional IT contacts who would find that newsletter useful.

Upload that spreadsheet into the service and use the system to send a welcome message (opt-in or opt-out) to your new subscribers.

Each week your subscribers will receive a tailored email from your email address with just the topics selected by that subscribers.

The newsletter will have a banner with your name, contact info, picture and logo.

There is great value in being the provider of useful information to your key contacts!

You can sign up as my subscriber and experience the newsletter as would one of your contacts. See this blog post.

Sponsored Section + Newsletter Service + Reseller Newsletter Service

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

IT News and Events (ITNE) offers services for a vendor that will:

  1. Put news and information about the vendor in front of a large number of qualified people (Sponsored Section)
  2. Provide the vendor, their sales teams and their resellers with an optional tool that they can use to educate and inform their contacts (Newsletter Service)

Sponsored Section

ITNE has been publishing a weekly Enterprise IT newsletter for 20+ years. Our main publication has 50k+ subscribers and has been focused on Enterprise IT since 2011.

That newsletter is composed of sections like CxO, Security, Networks, Big Data, Servers, Storage, Compliance, Backup. Each subscriber can disable section that they are not interested in. About 80 articles each week.

Each week, we track which articles are clicked on and we make a second newsletter with just the most popular, “crowd selected” articles. That newsletter (“ITNews”) has 20-25 articles each week, also in named sections that subscribers can enable/disable.

We can add a section called “XX News” (where XX is a company or product name) and include it in the newsletter of all 50k+ subscribers.

We can populate that section each week with content from your website – press releases, blogs etc. That section will also have it’s own URL.

Here are some examples – the URLs for  “Citrix News” and “Red Hat News”

We charge $100/week for that service.

Newsletter Service

INE can create a custom newsletter from your named section and plus the “ITNews” sections. That’s what you see for the Citrix example.

A salesperson can be given an account from which they can add their contacts who will receive a weekly newsletter, automatically, from that sales person’s email address, with a masthead for that sales person (picture, logo, contact info.)

Most people selling or marketing into the enterprise IT space see the value in having a regular newsletter with valuable content sent to their key contacts. However, they know how hard it is to produce a quality newsletter that their contacts will value.

Each newsletter account costs $20 per month if you also have a sponsored section.

Reseller Newsletter Service

ITNE can also create a custom newsletter for your resellers. They will have a different publication url. They can choose which sections they make available to their customers.

We charge $200/month per reseller for that service. You can choose to provide that service to certain of your preferred partners at your cost or they can deal with ITNE directly.

Getting Started

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

Here’s what you need to get started:

  • Your headshot picture (could be a link to your LinkedIn Profile picture)
  • Company logo
  • Name and email to be displayed in email (as sender) and in in newsletter banner
  • Title
  • Phone number that your contacts can call to reach you
  • Your company name

Here’s how my information shows up in the email newsletter banner:

And the same information on the web site:

I believe that by having your name in front of your contacts every week, automatically:

  • you will keep your professional contact list current
  • you will have an additional value to any future employer (we can add your new employer’s logo to the masthead)
  • you will be visible in the marketplace, you will be perceived as a trusted advisor and your ‘brand’ will improve
  • potential employers will notice your activities

You will see that the content in the newsletter is

  • for enterprise IT professionals
  • is quite broad
    • sections include: CxO, Servers, Storage, Networking, Security, Cloud, Risk, Technology, Backup, Bitcoin, DevOps, PM, AI, BI, ERP, CRM, HR, Humor, Operations, IoT, etc.
  • can be filtered by each subscriber (e.g. people not interested in IoT or AI can disable those sections and get a shorter newsletter)

Once you are set up with an account, you will be able to add your contacts:

  1. one at a time through our web based SAT tool
  2. a group at a time by uploading a spreadsheet
  3. by giving your contacts a unique URL to a subscription form

Here is a sample spreadsheet CSV. First row has the names of fields, second row has record for John Smith of Acme where he is an IT Manager:

company,first,last,title,phone,email,comment
Acme,John,Smith,IT Manager,954 324 7867,john.smith@acme.com,This will not be seen by the subscriber. Could be a customer id

If you are like most IT sales professionals you will have:

  • LinkedIn contacts
    • you can download a spreadsheet from LinkedIn that has some information, but not the email, for each of your contacts
      • in a spreadsheet tool, you can delete the rows for those LinkedIn contacts that don’t make sense to add as newsletter subscribers
      • for the ones you want to add, you will have to look them up in LinkedIn to get their email address
    • note that the trend in LinkedIn for the last few years is for people to use personal email addresses rather than business
  • contacts (in your email client, CRM system or other tools) which can be exported into a spreadsheet
  • stacks of business cards
    • every sales rep I know has boxes of card from customers, partners, prospects etc.
    • sort through the one that make sense to add to your list
    • there are scanning/ocr products that will scan business cards into a spreadsheet

Go through those, removed unneeded columns, and determinate the people you want as key contacts and add them as your subscribers!

This effort will not only improve your visibility in the market, but it will set you up well for whatever new position you take!

Quick Pricing Summary

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

Here’s a quick summary of what the Managed Enterprise IT Newsletter As A Service costs.

  • For one sales rep, with up to 500 contacts, about $33/week
  • For five sales reps, with team features, a custom website, and up to 1000 contacts per rep, about $13/week per rep ($285/month)

Let’s break that down. These are the main components:

  • Content for main newsletter (52 weekly issues)
    • ~80-100 articles/week
    • selected from 150+ mainstream IT publications (e.g. CIO, eWeek, Computerworld, Network World, CSO, ComputerWeekly, Dark Reading,How-To Geek, Information Management, ZDNet, CNET, ITProPortal, etc.)
    • No vendor or product articles. Nothing controversial or political
    • Each subscriber can choose which sections are included in their copy of the newsletter which will be send by the “sender account”
  • Content for Enterprise Newsletter As A Service
    • The most clicked on ~20-25 articles from main newsletter
    • Slightly expanded
    • “crowd-selected”
  • Sender account
    • name + contact info, picture, logo as newsletter as website banner
    • web-based account to manage sender’s own subscribers
    • per-sender subscription request form
  • Website and team edition
    • sender can move contacts to other team members
    • unique URL for website
    • add DNS record to make website appear under sender’s domain
    • newsletter and website layout tailoring
    • ability to add content to team edition
      • that content will be included in newsletters sent to each team members’ subscribers

Details

Number of Reps:12345
Website
Shared SharedCustomCustomCustom
Content$100$100$100$100$100
1 sender$20
2 senders $40
3 senders $60
4 senders $80
5 senders $100
up to 500
subs		$20
up to 2500 subs $45
up to 5000 subs $65$65$65
Add website
with team features		 $20$20$20
Monthly$140$185$245$265$285
Weekly$32.31$42.69$56.54$61.15$65.77
Weekly per rep$32.31$21.35$18.85$15.29$13.15
avg. subs per rep5001250166712501000

Email Marketing: Steps To Building An Effective Campaign

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

Brooke Bayer writes in Business 2 Community, “Developing an email marketing plan is a great tool to not only nurture your customers through the customer journey and to stay top of mind, but also a great tool for maximizing sales and customer loyalty. This tactic is used to build on that existing relationship and providing valuable information. Email marketing also allows you to target a specific audience, which is known as segmentation, based on your customer personas. The audience segments allow you to send the right content, at the right time, to the right people.

Why You Should Use Email Marketing (HubSpot, 2018):

  • Build Relationships – email marketing is a great way to build connections while delivering personalized content
  • Brand Awareness – When people receive an email from you, you will be top of mind and will be the first call they make when they are ready to move forward
  • Content promotion – people spend hours in their emails on a daily basis, which makes this a great outlet to share your most recent blogs, webinars, podcasts, etc.
  • Lead Generation – offering valuable content on your website will entice prospects to provide their information in exchange for the value add
  • Product Marketing – email marketing is a great way (and easy way) to promote your products and services right to your prospects
  • Lead nurturing – emails allow you the opportunity to nurture your contacts through the customer journey as you provide them with the right content, at the right time

However, a solid email marketing plan is not just segmenting lists and sending out a monthly newsletter – there is more to it than just that…”

5 Compelling Reasons Small Businesses Benefit from Sending Email Newsletters

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

Susan Friesen writes in “Business 2 Business“, “‘I don’t want to annoy people,’

That’s one of many excuses I hear from clients when I ask them about sending out consistent email newsletters to their followers.

Are you guilty of thinking this way too? Well stop it!

When someone comes to your website and enters their name and email address to sign up for your newsletter, they are literally putting their hand up and saying, ‘yes, I want to hear more from you!’…”

5 Compelling Reasons Small Businesses Benefit from Sending Email Newsletters

Bolstering Your Ecommerce with Email Marketing

Posted on by johnjmclaughlin

Salesforce writes, “Want to boost your e-commerce sales, but don’t know where to put your marketing budget for your next campaign? Consider this: 64% of companies consider email marketing the most effective marketing channel. Even with numerous new marketing channels — such as social media, direct messaging, mobile app marketing, and so on — email marketing still provides a remarkably effective solution. Additionally, the relative low cost of implementation associated with email marketing makes for an astoundingly high return on investment; the average return for email marketing is $38 for every dollar invested, or an ROI of 3800%.

Historically, email marketing has been very effective. If current trends are any indication, it will likely become even more effective as technology continues to improve. Email open rates, engagement, sales, number of emails sent, and traffic generated from emailing are all on the increase…”

Ecommerce Email Marketing Best Practices

Read On…